A few months ago my computer’s hard drive started displaying signs of impending failure: occasionally the disk would not be detected by controller, leaving my computer unbootable. A couple of reboots and a patient 5-to-10-minute wait would normally get me into Windows though, so I wasn’t terribly worried.
But I was worried enough that I set up an automated backup mechanism using the awesome rdiff-backup. After all, nobody likes to lose many years worth of photographs, documents, saved passwords, accounting files, and minesweeper high scores. With only a trivial shell script, I was able to configure rdiff-backup to do its thing onto an external hard drive connected to a Linux box on the other side of my bedroom. So when the time came for the drive to kick the bucket last month, I couldn’t help but feel smug about myself. Data loss can’t touch me—I have backups.
I was obviously tempting fate with these kinds of thoughts, and it didn’t take long for me to realise it. About two weeks after having laughed in the face of danger, I carelessly shut down the PC that hosts the backups, which was being particularly noisy and was keeping me from sleeping. The next day, I turned the PC back on before heading off to work. It was about that time that fate reached out and punched me in the nose: the USB hard drive wouldn’t power up, no matter what. I used my trusty old “try again in 5 minutes” strategy, but the drive was having none of it. I was data loss’ bitch.
Fortunately I found this excellent guide by Scott Cramer, which suggested I may be able to recover my data by removing the drive [1] from its case and hooking it up to another PC via its SATA interface. This worked beautifully, and I was able to recover all my important data with the help of a friend’s computer, but it could have as easily not have worked. Let this post serve as a friendly reminder for you to get into the habit of backup up your valuable data, or asking the machine do it for you automatically. There are several applications you can use to do this. I can recommend rdiff-backup, featured above, or Mozy for the less technically-inclined.
You probably hate me for having wasted ten minutes of your life right now, but you will thank me later, when your suffer hard drive failure and backups save your behind. Bo, selecta.
[1] A Western Digital MyBook 320GB.
